A Danger to Herself and Others(17)
This is not what I had in mind. I wanted to sit next to Lucy. I wanted them to see us laughing and giggling. I wanted them to see me encouraging her to eat, but not too much, not so much that she’d have to purge later. How can I do that when Lucy is across the room?
The girls across from me eat their food silently. I wonder whether Lightfoot put them on medication to keep them quiet. I notice that each of them has clean hair. Unlike me, they have shower privileges.
A girl sits down next to me. I smell her before I see her. Her hair is thick with grease, and her skin is marked with acne. No shower privileges here. No trance either.
“Whatcha in for?” She elbows me. Then she grins. “Just kidding.”
I look across the room at Lucy’s table. The girl beside me follows my gaze. “You’re obviously not one of them.” I raise my eyebrows. “I’m not calling you fat or anything. But they make the girls with eating disorders sit together.”
So that’s why I couldn’t sit with Lucy. At the eating-disordered tables—three tables in all, with no more than five girls at each table—there are attendants stationed at either end. On this side of the room, the attendants aren’t quite as on top of us. (The attendant who walked us down here has moved, so that he’s standing in between our table and the next, keeping an eye on both.) It’s easy to tell the anorexic girls from the bulimic ones. When an anorexic girl refuses to eat, one of the attendants places a can of Ensure on the table in front of her. The bulimic girls eat quickly, then stare at their plates in disgust. Some of them are wearing real pajamas, not paper pajamas; apparently that’s another privilege I have yet to earn.
“Seems to me it’d make more sense to spread them out.”
“Why’s that?”
“So they could see what normal eating looks like.”
The girl beside me snorts, picking up her flimsy spoon and bending it. No matter how much she twists it, it doesn’t break. Indestructible plastic, another precaution against sharp edges. “Yeah, ’cause this is so similar to how we all eat at home.”
Can’t really argue with that.
“True,” I say, and I smile, in case the attendant is watching. Maybe this entire outing is some sort of test. Maybe he’s going to report back to Lightfoot this afternoon.
I look around. There are five girls at Lucy’s table across the room. Four at ours. There are two empty tables directly in front of this one, and then a table with five girls. Four on one side; one on the other, facing us. The four with their backs to us look like they have clean hair—shower privileges. Even from behind, I can tell they’re laughing.
The other girl looks like she hasn’t showered in weeks, though she’s wearing real pajamas. When she speaks, the four girls across from her nod along in agreement.
“Hard to miss her, isn’t it?” says the nameless girl beside me.
I nod, but I don’t lower my gaze.
I know how to spot a queen bee when I see one, even in a place like this.
One of the trance girls across from me speaks up. I guess Lightfoot hasn’t medicated her into silence after all. “I heard she’s been here for over a year.” She doesn’t even have to turn around to know which girl we’re talking about.
Beside-Me nods. “Family history on both sides.”
“History of what?” I ask.
Beside-Me shrugs. “Mental illness. Violent behavior. Criminal records. You name it, she has it.”
“She has it or her parents do?”
“Does it matter?” Beside-Me asks, and again I have to admit that she has a point. Of course, she was just kidding when she asked me why I was here. It doesn’t actually matter. Perhaps it matters to the staff—the way they seat us and separate us. But it doesn’t matter to us. Whatever we did, it was enough to get us sent here either way. That’s all that does matter.
Three tables away, Queen Bee sits up straight, but not in the perfect-posture way that Lucy sits. No, she lifts her chin to watch the girls across from her hang on every word she says.
“If she’s been here so long, you’d think she’d have figured out how to get shower privileges by now.”
The other trance girl glances at QB over her shoulder. “She gets what she wants when she wants it.” She sounds positively awestruck, like she’s talking about a celebrity who turned greasy hair into the hot new trend. The cliques here aren’t all that different from the ones in a high school cafeteria, when you think about it. The girls with eating disorders are like the jocks. The girls at Queen Bee’s table are no different from the girls at hundreds of high schools across the country, determined to stay on their popular friend’s good side, lest they get banished to a loser table across the lunchroom.
Maybe if you put a bunch of teenagers together, it always ends up like this.
“She has the orderlies wrapped around her finger,” Beside-Me adds, lowering her voice to a whisper. “I heard she even got one of them to sneak her a cell phone.”
Out in the real world, Queen Bee would probably be considered a freak: mentally ill, unwashed, dressed in pajamas in the middle of the day. But in here, the other girls look up to her. In here, she’s powerful.
Of course, she’s been here for a year or more. With power like that, she probably doesn’t want to go home.
I look around at the ugly blue walls. There are rows of fluorescent lights on the ceiling like the one in the room upstairs, but this room still isn’t as bright as the room upstairs. Perhaps because the cafeteria is so much bigger (I wonder how an attendant would react if I got up and walked across the room, counting my steps), the fluorescents have more ground to cover. The windows in the cafeteria are every bit as small as the lone square of glass in my—our—room, but these are all in a row, a dozen of them. With bars over them.